The internet has grown explosively over the past decade, during which time the internet has evolved into a multinational forum for e-commerce, educational and informational exchange. With this explosive growth, the sheer volume of content available on the internet has made it difficult for content providers to make their content known and for users to find the content. While large businesses with large marketing programs and budgets can garner great attention and generate high traffic volumes to their sites through mass media advertising and the like, small content providers, such as individuals and small businesses, go all but unnoticed.
Search engines, such as Yahoo and Excite, make finding information from even small business and individual web sites possible by spidering content and generating a searchable index of the content. However, these search engines are limited in that they generally index keywords from the full content and/or the metatag fields, such as, the “keyword” and “description” metatags that provide descriptive information regarding the content. However, there are no means for these search engines to parse the content and conduct field specific searches within the content. For example, a searcher looking to buy a used 1995 Porsche might conduct a search for the terms “Porsche”, “For Sale” and “1995”. Such a search may return thousands of hits, including articles or reviews about Porsches, sellers of Porsche related merchandise such as sunglasses, t-shirts, mugs, etc., new Porsches, Porsche parts, etc. Interspersed among all of these hits that are not relevant to the user's search request, there may be several sites selling Porsches. However, even among the sites selling Porsches, the search engine's summary of the search results is unlikely to provide critical information to the searcher, because the search engines have no way of finding and presenting the vital details in the index of hits. For example, it is unlikely that the index will include the price, model year, model type, mileage, etc. Since search engines typically extract the page title and several lines of text from the beginning of the content for inclusion in the search result index, these statistics will be presented to the user only by chance. Because this information is frequently not presented in the search result summary, the searcher must then link to each web page individually to locate the vital and full details. This method of searching is inefficient and frustrating for the user. As a consequence, the user may simply turn to a large used car web site having field searchable centralized content.
As an alternative forum for small businesses and individuals to engage in e-commerce on the internet, online classified ad sites such as Yahoo Classifieds and auction sites such as Ebay have been developed. These sites offer sellers an opportunity to add their content to a centralized searchable database typically organized by product category. Although these systems provide a forum for individuals and small businesses engage in e-commerce, the seller's content must be entered into each site database individually and is confined to the data fields of the site's database. Moreover, due to storage space limitations and the rapid consumption of storage space by thousands of users placing product listings, these systems typically permit only limited product information and descriptions. Thus, the addition of customized content design and presentation including multimedia, video and sound, as is common on most web sites, is generally not available on these systems.
More recently with the popularization of extensible markup language (XML), standard development groups have begun to create global content tagging standards for decentralized content sharing and searching. For example, 4th World Telecom is proposing a tagging standard for real estate listings called the Real Estate DTD/Schema Design, and the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) is preparing a tagging standard for classified advertising called the NAA Standard for Classified Advertising Data. While these proposals provide a means for searching and/or indexing of decentralized content through standardized tagging schemes, the content must conform to the tags and tagging format of the particular tagging standard. This system is inflexible in that content developed pursuant to the tagging standard of one portal server can not be searched and indexed by another portal server using a different tagging standard. Thus the content provider is required to develop separate content for each portal tagging standard.